Edward Saeed: An Intellectual in the Chaos

By: Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

For us, the Palestinian issue is still a lost right that we do not strengthen by knowing it beyond the precise knowledge of who lost it. You will not find “Al-Jazeera” or “Al-Hadath” devoting in its torrent of news a specialist in history and culture to shed light on issues raised by the war once again over a fierce fire. Throughout my tracking of the battles, their experts and “news commentators”, I wished that these channels would bring someone who would discuss the issue of anti-Semitism that is spreading. Now in the fabric of American democracy as it has not been done since McCarthyism. Rather, these channels call on these scholars to change the opinion about the displacement of the Palestinians, which seemed to be something that Israel was forced to do because of the war, or it is the one that claims it. Even though it is a premeditated plan from the Jewish religious right as a “ final solution” in Nazi terminology, since taking up power in Israel, as stated in recent writings by the Jewish journalist Peter Bennett. Indeed, the Arab listener deserved to know the background of the relieve of Heredia from military service by Ben Guren, who is considered a modernist secularist, because he thought that they were an extinct group sooner or later. There is no harm in sparing them from military service until the last of them departs, and this is the relieve in which they now differ greatly.
In my memorial for Professor Edward Saeed in 2003, I presented his contribution to “educating” the Palestinian issue and imprinting it in the West’s historical and political imagination. For him, the issue is not another negative Andalusian right. It is the West in another way.
Sheikh Mohammad Fadlallah said that we did not know much about Israel even though we had not known anything else about it for half a century. Our clear right to Palestine has blinded us from an accurate understanding of this vile enemy. For us, the right is superior and unsurpassed, and no right is lost and there are demands behind it. But the question will remain if we have browsed through the papers of this right of ours, not as an abstract national, and religious belief, but rather as a culture that we leak to the world, so that our right becomes part of the world’s self-awareness, its respect for its humanity, and its anger for the truth.
That is why the late Edward Said that Palestine is the world’s issue. This issue was not at its best as noble and credible as the day the United Nations passed a resolution that included Zionism in the doctrines hostile to the human race. Just like Nazism and the apartheid regime in South Africa. Then we gradually descended from this peak to a bottom in which the issue shrank to an Arab or rather guerrilla size that had no resonance mentioned around the world.
It is known that Palestine is an embarrassing and old Arab concern. But I do not know whether we made it the focus of our school or public education. It is an education that goes beyond our insistence on our right to it to have a more accurate knowledge of the world that emerged from Israel and gave birth to a disaster.
These revised thoughts came to me while I was reading the late Edward Saeed’s book, “The Question of Palestine,” after his death last year for the first time. I regretted my slowness in reading it. I read his “Orientalism”, “Imperialism and Culture” and other theoretical books at the time. I decided that I excluded his books about Palestine because perhaps I was satisfied with what is necessarily known about our usurped right to it.
After reading the book, I learned not only about this usurped right, but also about the logic of the oppressor, who if he reached the world with wisdom and good advice, would guide the world to the upright. In Saeed’s opinion, Israel is the work of the world and the West, of course. For the West, it is a double investment. On the one hand, it is an investment in the past in that holy land, which the West did not rest in peace while it was in the hands of Arabs or Muslims. On the other hand, it is an investment in the future. The West wanted to make it a homeland for the Jews who adopted its culture and methods, so that it would be a democratic Western beacon in the Arab desert inhabited by Eastern tyranny.
Here, Saeed cleverly points out a strange “alliance” between the past and the future to kill the present. In Palestine, according to Saeed, there is a heavy Western imaginary and ideological burden that transformed Palestine from reality into a ghost and from presence into absence. For him, Israel is an interpretation of the past and a prediction of the future, and its architects did not care about the Palestinian present. In Saeed’s view, it is the interpretation that obscured the text, which is the Palestinians. This saying of Saeed, in general, is known to most of us, but for God’s sake, see how well Saeed framed it in such a way that it is justifiable to everyone with insight and heart.
I also liked Saeed’s statement that Israel is a new kind of colony. What is necessarily known about colonialism is that the colonized people are part of its alleged civilizational project. He wants to take their hand in the progress of modernization and urbanization. Take, for example, Gezira Scheme. It was established to serve a known English interest, but the Sudanese were an important component of it. As for Israel, it is a colony that the people (the Palestinians) do not take into account. It is not in its project to bring them into any “civilizing favor” as the British have done to us, as the petty-bourgeois elite announces.
It is a homeland for the Jews, and only that. This prevented it from investing in the future of the people whose homes it seized. The Europeans were cruel to the people who refrained from moving toward the future planned for them, citing heritage and clinging to the past. As for Israel, it is harsh on the Palestinians who criticize its project, which has no basis other than the past and the Biblical argument. In colonialism, it only resembles its spirit.
If Saeed is lost, he will be lost, by God. God created his intelligent pen for the turning point of the current Arab chaos, treachery, and extravagance. This is a turning point in which the opposition to Israel has become an overt habit. The term has become a legal right with it. You hear, do I not have the right to reconcile if so-and-so reconciles? Whoever reads Saeed knows that Israel’s rivalry, which was crowned with victory, in the name of God, has not yet begun.